A personal diary keeping people abreast of what I am working on writing-wise.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

THAT'S THE WAY THE THUNDER RUMBLES...?

Monday nights at the video store, I work alone until closing. It's usually pretty okay, allowing for some quiet moments by myself; but it also means when someone is annoying or weird, you don't have anyone to bounce off of, or to even turn to and just give the, "Can you believe this shit?" look to. I have so far avoided really writing about my retail experience here, but for some reason, I can't stop laughing at this incident.

This past Monday was actually pretty busy, a bit of the summer traffic finally starting. With fifteen minutes to go until close, there were about ten people in the store, including one old guy who was a new customer. He was probably in his mid-'50s, gray hair and beard, and he seemed a little lost. His two interests were the Chinese section and the Gay/Lesbian section, both of which I directed him to with my best stewardess hand motions.

After I'd shuffled everyone else out, he remained. I could see him in the anti-theft mirrors, still over in China. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there is a loud crash. He has somehow knocked an entire shelf of video and DVD cases to the floor. I go over and try to help him pick them up, and he is being very nervous and weird, concerned about getting them back in the right order (which is why I am there). Part of his nervousness may be because he apparently had been over there farting up a storm. The whole aisle reeked of his man gas. I was choking on it.

As I fixed the shelf, he pointed out Lan Yu and noted that it was a gay-themed movie and he thought it should be in the gay section. I explained to him that in some cases, we classified gay-themed films in the larger sections, often because studios tend to indicate what genre they want the stuff racked in. He then pointed out The Iron Ladies in East Asian and said it, too, was gay-themed. Then he looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said, "But you probably know that."

Oh, my God! He was cruising me! At my place of work! I'm standing in his stink fixing the mess he made, and the guy is hitting on me. Was the disassembling of the shelf a ruse to lure me to Asia? Is he some kind of scat pervert, and his farts were bait to lure me into his musky bear-hug? What f the whole "Chinese and Gay section" request was a set-up? Is the word out that one of the boys at the store is into Asian movies and is infamous for disrupting gadar?

Even if he had a shot to begin with, he'd have been lost when he revealed himself to be some kind of control freak. Normally, we fill out your new customer information, but that agitated him and he kept pulling the card away from me to fill it out himself, despite not being able to understand what the different slots were for even when I explained it to him. But then, maybe I made him nervous, and it totally threw the old pooter off his rap.

I swear, I need to rethink how I present myself at the store if this is the sort of action I'm going to stir up. Seriously. I intimated to one flirty customer (another old guy) that I liked girls, and he said, "Come on. With that much product in your hair?" No more recommending Audrey Hepburn movies. No more telling guilty-looking women that, no, there is nothing to be ashamed of, I also like Sex & the City, I even own the DVDs. It's all Robert Mitchum and Sam Peckinpah from now on. Though, speaking of the latter, did you see Steve McQueen's tight jeans on the cover of Junior Bonner? (Heh-heh. Bonner.)

My confession...

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.